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Sunday, 11 May 2014

Camjam May 2014

Wow these always get better, I arrived early to help set up but this time everything had been done early enough.

First thing to see was the new robot kit from 4tronix was like and was pretty impressed but for nearly 60 quid estimate. Price with no mention if it includes a pi means that although it's good it will be out of reach for lots.

Ryantek was next with his budget robot which is cheap and does what it needs to, this also is a nice platform to start off with before adding and upgrading as you go from starter to pro. A couple of tables away was a naughty or nice, bunny that poo'd eggs and a neopixel that lit up laser cut clear panels which was cool.

A virtual reality headset with graphics done on a pi was next and was a weird experience, certainly funny watching people wearing it.

The excellent little British robot company was there and have teamed up with kre8 to enter the budget robot market which schools can afford and allow pupils to take home building the robot case out of card and colouring it in and it's own happi breakout board.

Fuze were there with their keyboard case and os which you can learn the old fashion basic on :) certainly good stuff for those who grew up with the BBC micro.

Alex from hdmipi was showing the pi hdmi screen kit which still looks great and hopefully will be shipping in a few months.

Some great talks on various education stuff and on programming the pibrella which has extremely easy commands with about 5 lines of code to do something.

Pimoroni we're doing a learn to solder which participants had the chance to solder a solder ninja this became very popular that they ran out.

On closer inspection of the board it looks like a soc chip, mosi and miso amongst other things can be added so certainly a board that you can add to as you progress, hopefully available in next few months and already I want to order a few as I was surprised how popular they were.

I left with my bags of new stuff including leads and a decent set of small angled wire cutters which has improved the looks of my soldering as I can cut so much closer to the board.